Saturday, April 2, was a bright sunny day, just perfect for a horse show, or basically anything that requires you to be outside all day. We got extremely lucky with all the beautiful weather for every single event leading up to the show and the show day itself. Hubs and I and the other instructors got to the barn bright and early at 6:15 am to put the finishing touches on the horses and stable. Each rider got a folder with their show number, program and good luck chocolates. We gave out ribbons for 1st - 6th place and 1st - 3rd got prizes for each class.
The day started out with the opening ceremony, the Japanese and US national anthems were sung, and we had a moment of silence for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in mainland. Then, we were off with the dressage classes! This show we had 2 classes of the USEF Training Level 2 and 2 classes of the First Level Test 2. There was also an exhibition ride of 2 riders that wanted the 2nd Level Test 1 judged. On top of that there were 2 Japanese Quadrille teams and an exhibition ride by the Japanese instructor, Yama, on his favorite horse Rocky.
Pizzas were ordered for lunch and people brought all kinds of yummy sides, drinks and desserts to snack on throughout the day. After lunch and after the dressage arena was taken away we had the Hunter classes. These are classes on the flat where riders are in the arena with other horses and riders and have to demonstrate the calls of the announcer while keeping space from other horses. Keeping space is a huge challenge for these riders when all the horses want to follow each other! We had an adorable walk trot hunter class of little riders in their first horse show.
After the 6 hunter classes the winners of each class got to participate in a bareback class! Their names were put in a bucket and drawn out at random so they could pick the horse they wanted to ride. I was a bit worried that this could potentially go very badly, but it went great and everyone got some laughs.
Jumping Equitation finished up the day. We had a trot jumping class with 6 lower jumps and 2 canter jumping classes with 8 jumps a bit higher.
One of my students fell off during the jumping, but fortunately wasn't hurt. She just scared us to death! Other than that one hick-up, the day went extremely well and I'm so very proud of all the riders who worked so hard and I'm really proud of all the hard working horses too!
It amazes me how much work goes into pulling off an event like this. This is my 2nd time coordinating a horse show, and while this time was easier since I had done it before, I couldn't have done it without an enormous amount of help. The other instructors, parents, riders, and volunteers made this day a huge success and I love getting to work with such amazing friends!
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